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Available now: OctaneRender for Unity

OTOY’s cinematic render engine for the Unity editor has arrived! OctaneRender® is the first and fastest path-traced, GPU-accelerated render engine. In Unity, OctaneRender is available for free, or at $20 or $60 for packages that unlock more GPUs and OctaneRender plugins for leading 3D authoring tools.

Cinematic rendering in Timeline and Play mode

OctaneRender arms Unity creators with greater rendering power and quality for cinematic use cases. Born on GPUs, OctaneRender is an unbiased render engine, tracing each ray of light in a scene with physics-grade precision to deliver unrivaled photorealism in CG and VFX.

OctaneRender Recorder now allows you to record animations or sequences made with Unity’s Timeline and export either as a movie file or as an ORBX® format, which can leverage OctaneRender Cloud®. Recorder makes composing films through Timeline, Cinemachine, and now Play mode, that much easier.

In advance of next year’s Octane 4 with Brigade, our real-time path-tracer, OctaneRender for Unity is limited to pre-rendered content. However through cinematic rendering and the upcoming Live Lightmap Baking, OctaneRender for Unity expands what you can do in the engine today.

Overview of the main OctaneRender for Unity features in action. All within the Unity editor.

The PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) Viewport

One of the immediately noticeable features in OctaneRender for Unity is the PBR Viewport. It provides a window into your scene as viewed by a path-traced render engine. With Cinematic Rendering in OctaneRender, what you see is what you get. You can now use a Hollywood-grade render engine inside of Unity to create cinematic output from Cinemachine and Timeline.

OctaneRender materials and lighting

For pre-rendered sequences, OctaneRender steps up the quality of the scene immediately, even with standard Unity shaders. You can also choose to leverage OctaneRender’s node-based material and lighting system, which improves the overall look even further with physics-based quality.

In future versions, OctaneRender for Unity will also support Open Shading Language (OSL) for even greater flexibility.

OctaneRender for Unity on the Asset Store

Getting started with OctaneRender is easy: simply head to the Asset Store and download any of our scene packages. When you load any one of them, you will be prompted to install OctaneRender for Unity.

The Installer Scene is a good place to start, as it’s lightweight and friendly, but any package from OTOY’s storefront will install OctaneRender. Once you are prompted to install OctaneRender for Unity, check out the Octane for Unity installation guide for the step-by-step process.

We’ll be updating the Asset Store with new scenes to inspire you and provide some free goodies to use in your own projects. Keeping checking back!

These scenes will also be used in our project-based guides, so download and follow along to learn how to get the most out of OctaneRender for Unity.

Annual subscriptions to OctaneRender Studio and OctaneRender Creator offer access to more GPUs and a selection of additional plugins. They can be purchased here.

OctaneRender Studio is $20 per month and allows access to 2 GPUs and a selection of 1 additional plugin.

OctaneRender Creator is $60 per month and allows access to up to 20 GPUs and a selection of 3 additional plugins

Both OctaneRender Studio and Creator also include OctaneRender for NUKE and for After Effects as standard plugins. Simply follow the instructions emailed after loading OctaneRender Studio or Creator to redeem and download while selecting your additional plugins.

The paid tiers also provide access to OctaneRender Cloud as one of the plugin selections, where you can render in OTOY’s cloud to harness hundreds of GPUs for longer cutscenes or baking jobs.

Live Lightmap Baking Beta

Currently available in beta, Live Lightmap Baking will soon be completed and launched. GPU-accelerated baking can deliver 10x the speeds of current solutions, redefining how lightmapping in Unity is done today. Because OctaneRender can read Unity materials and lights, even legacy lightmap workflows can be accelerated with path-tracing. The Unity community can experiment with OctaneRender’s baking system in beta today, and more features and support will come shortly.

Hi Jules,
I bought standalone Octane few years ago, when it was in version 1.x. Lately I thought to upgrade to version 3.x
I’m mostly use it for hobby purposes, static scenes etc. Do you think this Unity version will be ok for me instead of standalone Octane?
If I get standalone Octane, is there a way to integrate it with Unity or I have to have Unity plugin anyway?
I’m thinking of getting $20 2-gpu subscription.

Hi Aleksander. Thanks for buying Octane so early in it’s development :)

You can absolutely use Unity’s Octane integration as a full replacement for standalone. The full standalone UX system, ORBX import/export node graph, Octane native viewport are all exposed inside Unity Editor and have identical features to the full Octane 3.x standalone features with no limitations or restrictions, other than 1 GPU in the free version. You can go to the Unity store at any time and get a subscription to the $20 month Octane Studio with adds multi-GPU support and includes a DCC plug-in of your choice (including ORC for cloud rendering).

In this post ‘live lightbaking’ is mentioned. This is something that I am really interested in.
I want to try it out, but I have been unable to find a guide of how to use or activate this. It this in the Unity beta or is it available in a beta of Octane? How do I acces live baking? I did see the option to create a bake camera in the node editor…

2-4 are covered, as Octane PBR render target is able to directly be connected to one or more live Unity RenderTextures (which can then be saved to a file, or re-used by Unity itself)

For (1), we are working on an automated system and UX in the next update (with OSL) that allows scenes to be prepared for multi-step (offline) or one-step (real time) GPU texture baking using Octane’s built in baking camera. This can be experimented with in the current release, but setup is a manual process more suitable for testing purposes while we make improvements to the front end (see my posts below for more information about the OSL camera and other roadmap details).

Really exciting release, was looking forward to it since I saw it at Unite!
I can’t get it to install via the asset, though. Facing some dll dependencies errors (like “Failed to load libfbxsdk.dll (). Errorcode: 87”)

Another use for this kind of rednering is outside the editor in pre-viz etc. (from your app/game) where you want to create a better rendered image of the scene to output. Any chance for a solution to this in future?

Is there some documentation or example scenes for the lightmapping feature that we can build upon?
I loved the rendering speed of the system in beta, but the lightmapping capabilities is really something we’d love to use in production :D

The baking camera itself is built into Octane. While it can be manually set up now with in this release (as some users have done), I would wait until we get to the next update (with the OSL baking camera and proper automation/UX) before using it beyond internal tests.

Once we add OSL integration in Unity (scheduled in the next update), there will be an OSL camera which can be used for many types of custom computational baking workflows. For example, a few lines of OSL shader code could capture irradiance and bent normal maps suitable for traditional light mapping systems. We are interested in building on this foundation to expose surface/volumetric light field baking tools (which have different cost/quality trade-offs relative to lightmapping + reflection probes – but you can mix and match these however you wish). The LF volumetric rendering system is further meant to blend seamlessly with Brigade’s real time path-tracing + real time AI denoiser (planned for Octane 4 next year). Octane 3.09, now in testing, will include a version of the AI denoiser for offline rendering inside Unity (and should also work with the OSL camera).

Sure. It’s just a manual process at the moment. As per my other post regarding the OSL camera coming up shortly, we are working on making Octane support a general purpose pre-computing system that also leads to practical light field baking (and playback in game mode) of assets and scenes, after we get the workflow better automated in the Editor UX.

Great news! I have e few questions.
Will this include the AI denoising feature when it’s out?
Can we render out single frame renders with the recorder?
Is there a resolution limit to renders or any watermark?
Can I use AI denoise feature with a GTX 780 TI or what are the requirements?
Are all the features from Octane standalone included with the free unity plugin?

Will this include the AI denoising feature when it’s out? – YES
Can we render out single frame renders with the recorder? – YES
Is there a resolution limit to renders or any watermark? – NOPE! :)
Can I use AI denoise feature with a GTX 780 TI or what are the requirements? – Kepler (maybe) and for sure Maxwell, Pascal, Volta GPUs and Hawswell (AVX2) level CPU
Are all the features from Octane standalone included with the free unity plugin?

I am so excited to share our first commercial release of Octane for Unity with everyone! This integration marks an important milestone for OTOY and Unity after a lot of hard work and planning. It is a foundation for many exciting updates we will be rolling out to subscribers in 2018!.

Octane is a cinematic renderer used across film, television, games, advertising, product design, and architectural visualization, and works with a full integration in dozens of authoring tools from Cinema 4D to Maya…and now Unity!

I am really proud of the fact that Octane in Unity is the world’s first built-in integration of a cinematic GPU path tracer hooked into the core of a game engine. With GPU light field baking, Brigade and real time denoising coming in our 2018 updates – the future finally feels like it’s arrived at our doorsteps (…next stop – the Holodeck!).

Looking forward to seeing what the world will do with this :)

Jules Urbach, CEO and Co-Founder of OTOY

P.S. . I am also very active on FB, Unity and OTOY forums, and happy to help fellow users and answer questions!

This workflow allows all lighting, animation, textures, hair, fur materials, scene data, volmetrics and more to be imported (and exported) between Octane for Unity and each one of these key 3D tools. In Octane for Unity all existing assets, standard materials and lights and more can be blended seamlessly with content form these dozens of other tools with Octane support.

It is also important to recognize that many artists work from models created by others, so they can focus assembling scenes, lighting, layout and materials in a higher level part of the toolchain, often using free or commercial assets available online. Unity is now at the point where it is a full fledged DCC tool, powered by Cinemachine, timeline and Alembic importing, even prior to Octane integration. This workflow is driving Unity authored cinematic content – see Adam – from major film directors like Neill Blomkamp (ADAM). Octane wil take this pipeline all the way to full cinematic quality not just in 2D but in VR/AR, games and more.

It is also important to note that even simple assets and models look amazing out of the box when they are loaded with Unity + Octane. Everything from Cinematic VR content to baking can be improved and sped up with Octane driving the rendering process.

Here is a more in depth post I shared in the Octane FB group about today’s launch: